In agile product development, the product owner plays a crucial role. But being a good product owner, or finding one, is challenging. What are these challenges and how can we make product owners more effective?

24 October, 2019

The product owner plays a key role in the agile way of working. The team delivers the value, the scrum master facilitates the team and removes impediments. But it is the product owner that determines what to do and where to go.

It is the product owner that must have the vision on the product and convey that to the team. He must manage the stakeholders, understand the end users and maintain a roadmap. Last but not least, the product owner must prioritize the backlog, which is the list of things the team will build.

Finding a good product owner is not easy

In practice, these things can be challenging to do. As a consequence, it is not so easy to find someone who can do all these things well. It can be a challenge to find a good product owner.

In our ‘agile age’, product owners are key. Many projects, programs or organizations depend on them. So if we can help product owners to be more effective, that might help these projects, programs or organizations as well.

To achieve that, we need some understanding of the challenges that product owners face and the situations which they have to cope. It would help if we knew the factors that play a role. We like to share a few observations from our agile work floor, as they may give insight in these factors.

Observation one: Being a product owner costs time

In most organizations, the more senior persons are rather busy. Those who understand the bigger picture, those who have a strong network and are mandated to make real decisions often lack one thing: time. And good product ownership inevitably costs time.

Observation two: There is no tool that fully supports product owners

Every team and scrum master uses a (Kanban-like) board. That board contains work items in columns named 'to do', 'in progress', 'done' and they contain impediments, availability etc. Such a board supports the scrum process and it helps the scrum master and team in being effective in their roles.

It is much less clear which tool the product owner can use. There are many separate tools for parts of the job. But there doesn’t seem to be an easy to grab or well-known tool that binds the different aspects of his responsibility together, so that it can guide him in successfully managing his tasks.

Observation three: Many product owners are relatively inexperienced

Agile practitioners help the organization to work in the correct agile way, and tell the organization to 'install' a good product owner. But in many organizations it is not feasible to have a capable senior person fulfill the product owner role.

Instead, there are inexperienced but often ambitious and talented people around. Regularly, these youngsters are baptized 'product owners'. Talented as they may be, these ambitious people normally lack agile know how, network, mandate, project experience and seniority.

Obviously, the above findings are our observations and your situation may differ. But these observations still suggest a few interesting things.

Conclusion

First, with supporting ‘youngster product owners’, organizations might be able to win a lot. We have seen quite a few inexperienced product owners that are eager, willing to learn and can pick up the good habits quite fast. In case your organization has them too, chances are that targeted mentoring and coaching may be very beneficial.

Second, current tooling doesn’t seem to be optimal for product owners. This raises the following question: is it possible to improve the tooling for product owners? If you think this is an interesting question, hold on! For this will be the topic for the next blog post.

For more information about the product owner role or about working agile, please feel free to contact the Author. 

Frans van der Veen

This article is written by Frans van der Veen and was originally posted on the Deloitte website in October 2019.
Frans van der Veen was manager at Deloitte Digital (Deloitte Netherlands) at that time.
He is now product owner coach @ Coaching & Agile